"Stand by Me"

Oh dear-- I knew It had been a long time since I'd updated this page, but I didn't realize it had been this long and that I didn't even write anything here in July. Well, if there are no updates, not much to write in the updates section. July was a very busy month and I found time to do very few updates. Let's see, now-- can I remember what they were. :-0

There's only one new poem in the Contributed Poetry section-- Tell Me Please by Brenda Race. I have more to add, more by Brenda, more by Dorothy Womack, and I want to add some by Carolyn Haynali soon. I have met so many wonderful very talented people on the PASSAGE list, and I'm having a difficult time keeping up with all their beautiful inspired poetry.

I have added links to this site on the Other Personal Homepages page, as well as to try to catch up in adding the sites of other PASSAGE members there-- Carolyn Haynali's and Brenda Race's. As with many pages at my site, I'm going to have to divide that page soon, I guess between family caregivers, AD patients, and professionals, because it has become to long to open in Windows Notepad for editing.

There are times I know Guestworld isn't working, and I have been intending to add an additional Guestbook. I have found one at view it here and sign it here I have also found a couple of other neat services at the same location. Here you can Add a Link to your site or to your favorite Alzheimer's/Caregiving site. Maybe this way I won't loose recommended site in email requests before I get a chance to add them. You can add them yourself, and they will be all in one place for me to add to my pages permanently when I get a chance. I believe this page will keep 100 links at a time before the service starts letting the earliest added drop off. The same service also offers a feedback form which I've added, where you can evaluate my site and tell me your comments and suggestions.

I'm also changing the look of my site a bit, trying to update the graphics, with new backgrounds and text graphic I've created (now that I've learned about Paint Shop Pro tubes and brushes and learned to do shadowed text). I seem to be leaning back towards the blue rose theme I used previously, but hopefully doing a much better job at making my backgrounds this time.

I think the only other page I've updated is Alzheimer's in the News. There was lots of hopeful news in the past month or so about the new vaccine, and I spent one weekend trying to catch up on adding links to articles.

Again, I am behind on giving the Remembering to Care Award, and I apologize. I have some wonderful sites in mind, and really I haven't decided on just one. Maybe I'll count all the months I've skipped over the past few months, and give awards to several sites at once to try and catch up. That is, when I get the time. I just got back Friday night from having to go out of town for a few days and really have a lot to get caught up on when I get back from a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning. Maybe someday things will slow down and I'll get more updating done on this site.

But now, this page too has become too long for me to edit for me to edit in Windows Notepad. I'll begin the next updates page with a new background I've done. And maybe by then I'll have more of the site redecorated. Please forgive any disorganization--always happens when I redecorate. And always my husband looks over my shoulder, shaking his head and saying "Content, content!" He doesn't understand why I spend time on backgrounds and graphics. Guess I would get a lot more content added here if I didn't, but I'm kind of addicted. Please bear with me.

Goodnight, love to all, and God bless you.

All along my site has been many things to many different people. From the beginning it has been a memorial and a grief resource. It has been a personal homepage in that it tells my mother's story and there are a lot of family pictures on the site. But an important part of it is the information. Though there isn't a whole lot of Alzheimer's information on the site itself, there are many links to outside information. There has been a struggle all along between the personal homepage and the information directory aspects of my site, and I've never known exactly how to handle it.

While some have said I should emphasize my mother's story, others have said people were coming for information. With these two conflicting goals in mind, I am going to begin dividing my site. Tonight I have added a new Alzheimer's Disease Information Directory, which includes only the pages of links outside my site. The personal home page side of my site will become more personal, though the information links will not be deleted, in this new page. I will work on a unifying main page at which point you will be able to choose to go to the information directory or to our story.

There is a third large part of the site which probably should also be linked on that new main page, and that is Alzheimer's Poetry. There's another new and very beautiful poem there this weekend by Carol Dix.

My apologies for all my web rings that are not working. It just dawned on me today that they aren't working because I haven't contacted all the web ring owners to let them know my URL has changed. I am trying to correct that now but have to work tomorrow so I won't be able to finish. From my stats it seems my site is still lost to many. I apologize for my poorly planned site move and for my lack of time for notifying people of my changed URL. Hopefully soon my site URL will be changed in all the search engines and those who have lost it will find it again.

Again, I haven't done a lot of updating, as there have been many, many errors that needed to be corrected at this new location after I moved my site. I would like to thank my friend Dorothy Womack, whose sharp eyes have helped me catch errors that I never would have seen otherwise. It may be there are still some remaining. If you find graphics not loading and/or broken links, whether internal or external, please email me and let me know, ok?

I'll start telling you about updates with the ones I've just done this weekend. I've neglected to give the Remembering to Care Award during this site-moving, but I've known who the next one was going to. I've just sent it to Laura Smith for her wonderful homepage. Just over a year ago I gave this award for the first time to a person with early-onset Alzheimer's, Diana Friel McGowin. Now I'm giving it to another person with early-onset AD, Laura Smith. Laura's homepage is a wonderful place, where she shares photos of her beautiful Montana surroundings and of her family, keeps a daily journal, and features poems and links to other Alzheimer's sites. Laura also began CWPML (Coping with Personal Memory Loss), a discussion list/support group. Thank you so much, Laura, for all that you are doing.

Also in the past month, I've added new poems by Brenda Race, Julie Western-Zuge, and Doug Thompson at Alzheimer's Poetry. All of the following are new there:

• Where Are They??? by Brenda Race
  
• Dear Dad by Julie Western-Zuge
  
• The Man We All Love by Julie Western-Zuge
  
• We Watched Him by Julie Western-Zugu
  
• A Change of Dress by Doug Thompson
  
• Come Walk with Me by Doug Thompson
  
• Eyes of Love by Doug Thompson

I've also added more midis on the Music page, and recently rediscovering/ renewing my spiritual life, I've added a page of Christian Midi Links and Song in the Night, a page of midis and lyrics for favorite choruses and hymns. My participation in the online discussion list/support group, PASSAGE, begun by Dorothy Womack, has helped me tremendously spiritually.

This weekend, as well as finally presenting the award again, I have also been playing around with adding search engines, site maps, and translation services to my main page. Some of these are pretty amazing. That main page can now be translated into five languages: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, using a service provided by Alta Vista. Also in looking for something else, I ran into a site search that amazed me, one that would spider my whole site and create a search engine that worked just like the big ones, and not only that but also create site map lists, and a "What's new" that would link the latest files I've updated. Pretty amazing. I've got it only on the main page so far, but you can try it all out here as well:

I'd love to put all of the above on every page and might eventually. But there are more important things to concentrate on now. I want to add more poems by others, want to add a section of inspirational/religious poetry, and somehow have to notify everyone who has me linked that my site has moved. According to my stats, my site is kind of lost to most everyone right now. Unfortunately, my former ISP didn't leave my redirection link at the old site when I cancelled the account. I've changed the URL with the search engines, but am having a hard time getting the old URLs out of their databases, and also the only way I can come up with for notifying all the sites where I'm linked is emailing them one by one, which may take me the rest of the year.

I am feeling much better, though. This month I had blood tests, done by a new rheumatologist, and they were no longer ANA positive, which means I don't have lupus, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, or any of several related diseases, and I no longer even have the Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease I was diagnosed with two and a half years ago. I'm still being treated for fibromyalgia, but all of the rest is-- well, either were never there or are all gone now! The tests were "positive for lupus" over two years ago, and I was never told that they were negative until now. I thank God for this, and thank all of you, Dorothy Womack, and the others at PASSAGE, thank you all so much for your prayers.

As usual, I am way behind on email and on responding to guestbook entries, and for this I apologize. I think that I need a week's vacation from work just to try to get caught up on all I need to do concerning my site, but won't have one any time soon. Thank you all for your patience with me.

I am sorry that there have been hardly any updates at this location and none at the old location at HiWAAY, as I am moving the site to a new location at https://www.zarcrom.com/users/yeartorem/. This location will be updated, but the one at HiWAAY will not be. I will be taking down that one as soon as all errors are fixed at this new location, which will hopefully be a the end of this month. HiWAAY has been a wonderful ISP, and a great place to have my site, but I am moving the site so I will no longer have to pay for an ISP I am no longer using as I have moved out of the coverage area. I am thankful that HiWAAY has allowed me to continue keeping my site there until I could get it moved.

I am sorry I haven't even given a Remembering to Care award this month or last month. I will try to catch up at least with this month's this weekend. The new site's location here, thanks to a gift from Zarcrom, will give me a lot more space, and I have many, many plans for expanding the site. My only limitations will be my lack of time (because of work) and lack of energy (because of the undifferentiated connective tissue disease I have).

So goodbye, and thank you so much to HiWAAY for providing space for this site since July 1996. And hello and thank you so much to Zarcrom for providing my new web space.

I've done it again! I've done quite a few updates over the past month, but I forgot to update my updates!!! :( I'm sorry. Now, the biggest task is to remember what I have updated in the past month. ;-O

I'll start with the most important thing, which has been regularly updated practically all month. I told you last month about the caregiver, Denise Cooper, who has been who has been diagnosed with lung cancer. My Prayers for Denise page that I added last month has now become a Candles for Denise page, as I have joined with several ladies who have Alzheimer's and caregiving pages in "Denise's Path of Love" and her "Circle of Light". Denise has a very popular web site, Alzheimer's: Coping with Alzheimer's, providing information and sharing her experiences with her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. You can read about Denise's diagnosis with lung cancer and her experiences since in her almost-daily journal entries at her site: February (the month she was diagnosed), March, and though I'm not sure it's there yet as I'm updating this, I'm sure her April Journal will be here, so I'll add it now. Denise has not felt like updating her journal every day since her diagnosis, and even a couple of days, her son Robert has had to to the journal entries for her. He has also placed this Our Plea page there. As her mother's 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week caregiver, Denise has not been employed, and she couldn't afford insurance herself (I know how that is-- been there, done that!). Getting lung cancer and having no insurance is about the worst thing I can think of that could have happened to someone who was already in the stressful position of being full-time caregiver for a mother with Alzheimer's, so if you can help financially, please do-- Instructions are on Robert's Our Plea page.

As I was saying before, I have joined in an effort to show Denise my support, along with three wonderful ladies: Marsha (aka Tay) of Alzheimer's Outreach, Kate of Kate's Place, and Nancy of Caregiver's Haven. To visit our "Path of Love" for Denise, you can start at any point and connect to the others through a link from one to the other. If you like you can start at my Candles for Denise page at this site, visit several pages for Denise at Marsha's site, continuing on through each link to arrive at Denise's Prayer and Message Board at Kate's Site, which connects back with a link to my Candles for Denise page here. If you haven't done so yet, please email me, Marsha, or Nancy to add a candle in your name for Denise, a symbol that you will keep her in your thoughts and prayers, and visit the Prayer/Message Board at Kate's site to post a poem, prayer, or message for Denise.

Also, I presented Denise with the March 1999 Remembering to Care Award. Denise's site is unique in that she has kept an almost daily journal of her caregiving experience on her site since November 1996. I don't know of another website owner who, as caregiver for someone with Alzheimer's, has kept an online journal for that long. Denise also has provided several chats, a message board, and a "Sharing and Caring" service for caregivers who have visited her site.

I'm very late in announcing it here (embarassingly late), but I did an Easter Page within the last couple of weeks (It was linked from my main page, at least.) I also added a wonderful new Easter poem by Jerry Ham, The Promise of Easter in the contributed poetry section. And I added something I'm very proud of, contributed by another poet, Dorothy Womack. Dorothy sent me pictures of paintings done by her mother, done after she began having symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. I had them scanned, and I placed them here: The Paintings of Vivian Hanby. I think you'll agree, these beautiful paintings are amazing, and I'm so glad Dorothy shared them with us.

As for other updates, well, I know I've updated Alzheimer's in the News just a bit, and I think I have a few of the others, though I can't remember which now. And on Other Personal Homepages, I've added the wonderful new page of Laura, a very special Early-Onset Alzheimer's victim who is doing an amazing job with her new homepage. I've met Laura on the PASSAGE and CWPML (Coping with Personal Memory Loss) lists. Thanks so much to Laura for sharing her life with us, through her page and on these lists.

Other than all of that, in the past month I have tried to get the pages of my site to be a little more consistant, have changed some pages to some nicer backgrounds, and have taken off counters from my former ISP (where my page still is, and I've got to move it) and replaced them with those of the BeSeen service. I've got to move my site as I'm paying for an Internet connection I no longer use, just to keep my site here (I have moved to a different part of the state, out of their coverage area). I will try to begin moving it in the next few weeks, but may just do it in sections, and it will take me quite a while, I'm sure, so I will leave the site intact here until I have completely moved it.

Good night and take care of yourselves (as well as the person you're caregiver for), everyone!